Cisco's Bold Move

"Industry experts say that Cisco's push into the server market will disrupt that comfortable symbiosis and could cause an all-out war among the tech titans for one another's customers."

"This will be the most important and most talked-about product of the year," said Brent Bracelin, a hardware analyst for Pacific Crest Securities. "There will be massive competitive reactions from both I.B.M. and H.P., and we expect this will lead to a new wave of industry consolidation."

It's no coincidence that virtualization is the battleground, either. That's another recession-market hotspot.

More from Forbes: "The Cisco theory, held by many others in technology, is that most parts of the giant data center will eventually become commoditized. The only way to hold margins in this world is to control most management of the overall system. Hewlett-Packard, IBM and others have computer-centric plans for management. By contrast in Cisco's world, the network switches and routers, which touch all the other machines, is the ideal management center. With the right software, functions like storage and computation can even disappear into switching."